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Another one of the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Short Film. I suspect most of the morning media is going to be focused on the non-political:

MOSCOW — A plunging meteor exploded with a blinding flash above central Russia, sowing panic as the hurtling space debris set off a shockwave that smashed windows and left over 400 people injured…

It was not clear if the meteor was linked to the asteroid 2012 DA 14 which is expected to pass about 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometres) above the Earth later Friday in a unusually close approach to the Earth.

The meteor “was quite a large object with a mass of several dozen tonnes,” estimated Russian astronomer Sergei Smirnov of the Pulkovo observatory in an interview with the Rossia 24 channel.

Schools were closed for the day across the region after the shock wave blew out windows of buildings amid temperatures as low as minus 18 degrees Celsius (zero degrees Fahrenheit)…

The Chelyabinsk region is Russia’s industrial heartland, filled with smoke-chugging factories and other huge facilities that include a nuclear power plant and the massive Mayak atomic waste storage and treatment centre.

A spokesman for Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy state corporation, said that its operations remained unaffected.

“All Rosatom enterprises located in the Urals region — including the Mayak complex — are working as normal,” an unnamed Rosatom spokesman told Interfax.

The emergencies ministry said radiation levels in the region also did not change and that 20,000 rescue workers had been dispatched to help the injured and locate those requiring help.

And if this appeared over Moscow, maybe their nuke anti defense system gives warnings and they go on high alert …then if it was a little bigger it explodes (with near nuclear blast energy) over/too close to Moscow. Or worse, an impact in/near Moscow. Then possble nuclear war due to a natural event … yes, lets cut NASA further; its not like they currently can detect anything that size or even a good bit bigger, so what use are they? I believe their ok with half kilometer or larger. Why waste money for detecting smaller objects and … well, nukes give more bang for the buck and we have a lot of those so to use if a war starts we are fine… .

NASA spokesman this morning pointed out that 1) this was totally unrelated to 2012 DA 14 (wrong approach vector) and 2) it was small enough that they wouldn’t have bothered tracking it anyway. He was rather giddy at the prospect of obtaining and studying some of the debris from the meteorite. He also didn’t seem terribly concerned that folks had been injured by it. Methinks NASA might want to find a bit more sociable spokesperson.

I don’t know…..where I have seen there are a good amount of videos, mostly car videos, that show it going through the air, I have seen none of it actually hitting the ground, just video of the aftermath.

Wow. Meteorite videos are riveting. A Verge link in thread below had one with with explosions that scared our cats. I saw some other videos, maybe Guardian, showing door blowing into an office, glass windows shattering, scary stuff.

Republicans have used the powers accorded the Senate minority party to slow Obama’s influence on the federal bench. But recent changes to Senate rules suggest the process may begin to move faster, at least at the lower, U.S. District Court level.

Nearly half of Obama’s nominees have waited for more than 100 days for confirmation votes, while less than 10 percent of Bush’s waited that long, according to White House figures. Most of the Bush nominees were approved in less than a month after clearing committee, the White House said.

Modest reform is modest, but welcome.

Under a recent bipartisan agreement, the Senate will limit debate on district court judge nominees to two hours, far below the 30 hours that used to be allowed

Might I suggest that it not be up to NASA exclusively to look for meteors? As this one proves so ably, they’re a problem for everyone everywhere, so they really ought to be dealt with by some kind of international organization. Maybe the UN isn’t the right choice, but can we at least work with other spacefaring nations to deal with it? I bet the Russians are especially motivated now.

@Betty Cracker: After the tsunami hit Japan I remember everyone was arguing about building nukes to withstand an 8.0 v building them to withstand a 9.0.

I commented over at your other site that building massive structures to withstand the worst is foolish, and we need to think about how we clean up after the fact. In fact I said, “what happens when a meteor hits?” Everybody thinks about the extinction level meteor, but Tunguska are much more common. My point was that you can’t go in and clean up the rubble if it;s all radioactive.

While not the impact of a meteor explosion, yesterday’s death of Ronald Dworkin was a blow to me. Dworkin was one of the most important and influential legal and moral philosophers of the past 50 years. His frequent essays for the New York Review of Books, mostly on Supreme Court decisions, were models for how to make legal issues compelling and comprehensible to those without the benefit (?) of education or training in the law.

His final book, Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), its title a pun on Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, is a summation of his life’s work in moral philosophy. I’ll disinter it from one of my book piles to start reading this weekend.

@General Stuck: “Under a recent bipartisan agreement, the Senate will limit debate on district court judge nominees to two hours, far below the 30 hours that used to be allowed.”

Good news and bad news. The bad news is that this debate limitation is strictly on post-cloture debate, which means they can still filibuster a nominee forever and a day if they want.

The good news is that in 2010, using the full 30 hours of post-cloture debate was one tool that the GOP made abundant use of, to drastically reduce the number of nominees they’d approve, even when hardly anyone was voting against cloture. So this at least deprives the GOP of one slowdown technique on nominees that they can’t come up with an excuse to filibuster.

it is modest reform. Though the wingnuts would likely not successfully filibuster District Federal Judges. But like you say, in does put a stop to calling for cloture votes for no other reason than to stretch out the final vote for 30 hours.

What is more newsworthy on the filibuster, imo, was Reid refusing to honor holds on Brennan and Hagel. And the wingnuts for once using the filibuster to delay, but not kill a nomination. I don’t know if it will become the norm again, but I do think for executive session, the wingers know they are on shakier ground, because they themselves threatened to nuke the filibuster for nominees or judges. So maybe Reid’s threat to change rule 22 is causing some behavioral mod. If so, this is way better than dems changing the rule by breaking another rule without context of an active case of obstruction.

It’s been called a meteor and meteorite. Take your pick.
It landed in the Ural Mountains and it was north of Kazakhstan.
There could be as many of 950 hurt because of the shock wave.
It was going over 33,000 mph.
The next time John mentions a meteor, I’m going to listen.

I’m thinking if that big(ger) asteroid hits should I run across the street and make love to the skinny neighbor woman or the plump one? Or will my girlfriend be home by then? I’ll have to have another cup of coffee and contemplate.